Mark Zuckerberg, the co-founder of Facebook, says he is going to change the way people communicate. He believes that people are exchanging shorter and shorter messages to communicate with each other. But what will that do to our letter-writing skills?

Data portability is certainly not on most users’ priority list. It should be. We all routinely use devices and services from many different vendors. Different devices tend to use distinctive, and competing, operating systems. In computers it could be Windows, Mac or Linux. As for cell phones, besides the basic ones like Apple OS, Symbian, BlackBerry and Android, there are …